The Training Ground Read online

  As Grant opened his eyes to greet the day, the sound he heard most powerfully was not the soft crash of Texas breakers or the early morning warble of seagulls but the distant rumble of a prolonged and hostile artillery bombardment. “As we lay in our tents along the sea shore, the artillery at the fort on the Rio Grande could be distinctly heard,” he wrote of that moment. “The war had begun.”

  A skeleton force had stayed behind to defend the newly finished earthworks along the Rio Grande (referred to sometimes as Fort Taylor but more often as Fort Texas). It comprised the Seventh Infantry and a detachment of artillery specialists, all under the command of Major Jacob Brown. The Seventh had earned the nickname the Cotton Balers for allegedly taking cover behind cotton bales during the Battle of New Orleans. This group of roughly five hundred men now crouched behind walls fifteen feet thick, armed with four behemoth eighteen-pound cannons and a much less lethal battery of six-pound guns under the command of Lieutenant Braxton Bragg.

  Grant knew the two men by reputation only. Brown was that rare officer who hadn’t graduated from West Point, having enlisted during the War of 1812 and worked his way up through the ranks. He was in his midfifties, old for a major, and his career had been undistinguished and unsullied, spent in backwater postings like Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Yet Brown was beloved by his men, and the sort of quietly confident leader who was sure to remain calm as the enemy lay siege to the army’s newest fortress.

  Bragg was different. The North Carolinian was a tyrant, despised by his troops for his fanaticism about discipline and protocol. He had finished fifth in the West Point class of 1837, which had graduated more than a dozen future generals — a startling figure, given that it comprised just fifty men. Bragg was lean like a knife’s blade, tall, with iron gray eyes, great bushy eyebrows, and a sharp, unshaven chin whose point was accentuated by whiskers extending clear down both sides of his face to the jawbone. He was prone to depression, hypochondria, boils, and chronic diarrhea. Strangely, despite all this, women found him to be extremely charming. Bragg could display a sly sense of humor to those he pursued. Among his men, however, such attributes might be spoken of but were never witnessed.

  Bragg’s character was potentially assailable, but his ability and intellect were not. Actually, he was something of a military genius. Bragg’s specialty was artillery, which seemed like nothing more than a fancy word for cannons to nonmilitary observers. Such naïveté denied the complexity of nineteenth-century weaponry. There were large cannons for heavy bombardment and fort defense, small cannons for mobile battlefield use, and mortars for lobbing shells great distances. There were cast-iron cannons and the more lightweight bronze cannons. There were guns and howitzers; solid cannonballs, artillery shells, hollowed cannonballs filled with explosives, canister rounds, and those deadly bundles of shot known as grape.

  Bragg was adept at mobilizing and firing all of these weapons. Yet his favorite was the six-pounder (guns took their name from the heft of the solid cannonball that fit most snugly in their muzzle), the smallest cannon in the modern American military arsenal. Those small guns were perfect for battlefield use — light, horse-drawn, joyously mobile — and were quite effective against an army marching shoulder to shoulder into battle. But a six-pounder could inflict only minimal damage against heavy fortifications; if and when soldiers of the Mexican army swarmed the walls of Fort Texas, those guns would be ideal for close combat, spraying them with lethal rounds of canister and grapeshot. Until then, it would be up to the behemoth eighteen-pounders to lob down hellfire on the Mexican positions across the river. Eighteens were capable of demolishing almost anything. It was hoped those big guns could destroy just enough of Mexico’s defensive positions for the fort to hold out until Taylor’s return.

  Scouts galloping into Port Isabel soon reported that Mexican troops had taken up a blocking position on the only road leading back to Fort Texas. That was good news to Taylor, for the Mexicans were now out in the open, right where he wanted them.

  Not so for Grant. He was terrified and repulsed by the distant belch of cannons. He had no desire to fight; not in the open or huddled behind a bunker. He felt certain he wasn’t cut out for war. “For myself, a young second lieutenant who had never heard a hostile gun before, I felt sorry that I had enlisted,” he finally confessed. Yet Grant’s conviction that once he started something, he must continue forward until the thing was through, was stronger than any impulse to flee. The only way of relieving Brown, Bragg, and the Seventh Infantry — and returning home to Julia — was by pushing the Mexican forces back across the Rio Grande. Like it or not, war was Grant’s destiny.

  He wrote to Julia. More than anything, he wanted to be sitting with her on the front porch at White Haven. “As soon as this is over, I will write to you again. That is, if I am one of the fortunate individuals who escape,” he said, trying to reassure her but failing miserably. “You don’t know how anxious I am to see you again, Julia.”

  It crossed his mind that the letter might be his last.

  SIX

  Fort Texas

  MAY 3, 1846

  The stranded soldiers defending Fort Texas left their tents to shave as the regimental drummers beat morning reveille. “We had just commenced washing, etc., before going to work, when the batteries of the enemy opened, and their shots and shells began to whistle over our heads in rapid succession,” a young lieutenant named Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana wrote to his wife, Sue. “They had commenced in real earnest, and they fired away powder and copper balls as if they cost nothing and they had a plenty of ammunition.”

  Infantry soldiers sprinted to man the parapets while artillerymen raced to their cannons. Lieutenant Bragg and his complement of field artillery took aim at the Mexican positions as the four eighteen-pounders under the command of Captain Allen Lowd fired onto the enemy batteries. Each big gun weighed more than two tons. Standing on the breastworks, looking across the Rio Grande, the American troops could clearly witness the destruction their superior artillery rounds were inflicting. One enemy cannon exploded into the air in pieces, leaving the brains and torn limbs of dead and wounded men littering the ground.

  A half hour after the two sides began trading fire, a brown-haired sergeant named Weigart became the first official American casualty of the war. He was peering out at the enemy when a piece of grapeshot blasted through his chin and exited the back of his head. Weigart dropped facedown. Hair and blood matted the gaping hole in his skull. A sergeant standing nearby mistook Weigart’s body for that of an Irish soldier named Shea, who had a profound reputation for cowardice. “Shea is killed, sir,” the orderly sergeant informed his commanding officer in a shaking voice. “No, I ain’t, sir,” cried out Shea, standing up from the spot where he’d been hiding.

  The captain ordered that Weigart’s body be dragged to a hospital tent. An hour later, a second Mexican shell scored a direct hit on the hapless sergeant’s corpse, entirely severing head from body. A party was sent out to bury the remains in the dark quietly that night, exiting the fort to dig a grave alongside a wall that could easily be seen by Mexican troops. The work was perilous — they could have been captured and taken prisoner at any time — but the men got the job done and returned to the relative safety of their beleaguered earthworks, which in reality weren’t much safer.

  The nighttime silence along the Rio Grande came after a pummeling day of fighting. The din along the river had been tremendous. American gunners fired more than 350 cannon rounds, so many that they had to stop shooting after six hours for fear of running out. The Mexicans, meanwhile, lobbed more than 1,200 rounds on the earthworks. Wrote Dana, “We could not answer their guns anymore but keep our means for an emergency, and as they did not do us the least injury in that six hours firing, we concluded that it was unnecessary to throw away any more of our powder and shot unless they materially improved their firing. . . . We treated all their noise with silent contempt, and our men screened themselves from the shot and sle
pt on their arms.”

  Key to the fate of the American soldiers was their army’s return. Fort Texas was sturdy enough, holding up spectacularly to the bombardment, with little damage to show for the hours of punishment. Yet the fact remained that the trapped Seventh would run out of food and ammunition if Taylor didn’t arrive soon. No matter how effective the cannons inside the fort might be, or how inefficient the Mexican gunners, the U.S. soldiers could not endure indefinitely. The siege would break them. Sooner or later the Seventh would either starve to death or be forced to surrender.

  The situation took a hearbreaking turn for the worse at midmorning on the fourth day. Major Brown was making his daily rounds of the defenses. It was a normal walk-through: shells burst all around; his men dodged incoming artillery, staying low and pressing their bodies against a wall whenever they heard the telltale whine that signaled a new attack.

  Brown paused to direct a squad building a bombproof shelter, ignoring cannonballs whistling all around him. In a brilliant example of war’s sudden surprise, a Mexican howitzer shell blasted into his right leg, tearing away everything below the midthigh. Shredded muscle and jagged lengths of bone marked where the limb had been severed. Two soldiers, stunned by what they’d just witnessed, hoisted Brown off the ground and carried him quickly into the hospital tent. The military surgeon had seen few injuries in his career, let alone a shattered leg. Moving quickly, knowing that immediate treatment was the key to saving Brown’s life, the surgeon reached for the box containing his amputation scalpels and bone saw. A crowd gathered in the sweltering tent to console their commander. They believed the fort would surely fall if Brown’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. “Men, go to your duties,” Brown reassured the dumbstruck soldiers. “Stand your posts. I am but one among you.”

  The surgery was brutal yet delicate. The amputation utensils were removed from their case. They were clean but not sterilized, the concept of infection being then unknown. Likewise, there was no pain relief to offer Brown, just a jolt of medicinal whiskey and either a stick or a chunk of leather on which to bite down. Amputation victims were known to thrash wildly during the operation, so two strong men restrained Brown’s arms after he was lowered onto the surgical table. His left leg, the good one, was lashed to the table so that he would be unable to twist his body or kick as the surgeon sliced into him.

  A tourniquet was cinched around the femoral artery. The surgeon then snipped away loose muscles and tendons from the end of the destroyed leg. He wielded a very long and slender scalpel, taking care to leave a flap of skin big enough to cover the stump. Next the surgeon cut into the meaty end of Major Brown’s thigh, slicing clear down and around the bone.

  He reached for his saw. Rather than cut off the femur’s shattered tip, the surgeon pushed the muscle away from the femur until three inches of thigh bone were revealed. That way, after he had sawed it off, two to three inches of muscle would lie between the end of the bone and the flap of skin, ensuring that the femur wouldn’t poke through the end of the stump once Brown was sutured. Later, when he was fully healed, a wooden prosthetic leg would be fitted over the major’s amputated limb, allowing him to walk again.

  The surgeon, according to procedure, used his right hand to hold the saw, placing his left index finger directly on the bone to serve as a cutting guide. The work proceeded relatively quickly: Brown’s femur was sawed off, arteries and veins were sutured, water (also unsterilized and perhaps bearing a touch of Rio Grande mud) was splashed on the wound, and then the flap of flesh was sewn over the stump.

  Once the surgeon finished, he ordered that Brown be carried down into the safety of the underground ammunition magazines. Brown would recover in the sweltering, airless room until the siege ended. This postoperative recovery setting was hardly ideal, and Brown’s chances of survival, like that of his fort, depended upon Taylor’s hasty return.

  A few hours later, Mexican general Arista sent four officers to broker a surrender. They informed the lonely men of Fort Texas that a large enemy force had blocked the road between Fort Texas and Port Isabel. The Seventh was unlikely to be rescued or resupplied, stated Arista’s emissaries, and should surrender now before they began the long, slow death from starvation and dehydration that often accompanied a siege. Brown’s replacement as fort commander was Captain Edgar S. Hawkins. Arista gave him one hour to make his choice.

  Hawkins was a forty-five-year-old New Yorker who had the dubious distinction of having required six years to graduate from West Point (which he had entered at the tender age of thirteen). He had spent most of his career in garrisons along the American frontier. So he possessed ample experience in hostile border environments such as the one in which he now found himself. Hawkins listened closely as an interpreter who spoke very poor Spanish read the Mexican demand; then he called a council of his officers before issuing a response. Among them were the artillerymen Bragg and Lowd, Captain Joseph Mansfield, the fort’s designer, and Dana. The council quickly made its decision.

  “My interpreter is not skilled in your language,” Hawkins sent word to Arista, in a tone both defiant and courteous. “But if I understand you correctly, I must respectfully decline to surrender.”

  Arista’s furious reply was to launch the most withering artillery barrage the Americans had seen so far. Shrapnel and shells dropped on Fort Texas like summer rain. The U.S. tents, pitched carefully along the inside walls of the fort, were shredded by the flying metal. One piece of shot flew just over Captain Hawkins’s head while he ate breakfast. A single artillery shell pierced three horses that were standing side by side, killing them all. One soldier had a shell explode beneath his feet and escaped unharmed. Another experienced the odd sensation of having a shell roll over his back. He, too, was unharmed.

  In fact, despite the intensity of the barrage, the only casualties were fifteen horses and the military band’s drums and brass instruments, which were smashed by a direct hit on the chest in which they were stored.

  By the fourth day of the Fort Texas siege, morale was finally dropping low. Troops were becoming more and more disheartened. Ammunition and food were running out. All eyes scanned the horizon for Taylor’s return. Yet they saw nothing.

  Then they rejoiced at a most wondrous sound.

  Amazingly, after what seemed like an endless week of waiting, the men “heard cannonading about eight miles away, and immediately knew that the general was on the move and had met the enemy.” It was Friday. Their siege was six days old. At long last, the reinforcements were close.

  Yet their hopes were premature — and they knew it. Between Fort Texas and Taylor lay a massive Mexican force. Taylor had wanted his wide-open fight. He was about to get it. The lonely men of Fort Texas could only pray that he would win.

  SEVEN

  Clash

  MAY 8, 1847

  Grant could not see Fort Texas, but he could clearly see the Mexican army. They were three-quarters of a mile away, porched across the horizon like condors, half-hidden by a dense copse of chaparral on a plain known as Palo Alto. Their sharpened bayonets and polished brass cannons reflected the afternoon sunlight. The Mexican uniforms were a wild palette of colors and designs, plumes and epaulets, from the green and red of the lancers to the infantry’s dark blue and yellow. There was, in fact, nothing uniform about them, for every unit adorned itself with a different design and color scheme. They would have been ridiculous if they weren’t so deadly: Grant estimated that they numbered six thousand or more, with the cavalry on the right and left sides of their lines and seven units of infantry in between.

  Grant chose to focus his analytical powers not on fashion, but on the Mexican weaponry, his spectacular numeric disadvantage, and basic tactics: to Grant’s right was the road leading back to Fort Texas. On the far side of the road was thick chaparral. In front of Grant and the Americans was a rolling, grass-covered prairie, pocked here and there by small ravines. On the opposite side of the prairie was more chaparral, a line of trees — and a vast arra
y of shiny Mexican bayonets. Presumably, the Mexicans had several cannons camouflaged in all those trees and mesquite, but Grant could only make out shapes that may or may not have been artillery.

  Grant and the other American troops stood in shoulder-high Indian grass, the fierce yellow sun burning their faces. They were exhausted, having slept poorly the night before. “The mosquitoes seemed as thick as the blades of grass on the prairie, and swarmed and buzzed in clouds, and packs of half-famished wolves prowled and howled about us. There was no need for the sound of reveille. The wolves and mosquitoes, and perhaps some solemn thoughts, kept us on the qui vive,” Longstreet vouched for their long night out in the open. Then, no excuses, it was up at dawn to resume the march to Fort Texas. They drowsily marched the one-lane road in a dusty column of men, mules, oxen, horses, wagons, and cannons that stretched for three miles.

  At two in the afternoon, when reports confirmed that Mexican troops had blocked the road, General Taylor ordered his army to assemble for battle. The six infantry regiments spread abreast across the prairie in close order, with artillery units positioned between them. He placed the eighteen-pounders at the very center. Instead of traditional solid cannonballs, the big guns were being loaded with rounds of canister and grape.

  A canister round was essentially a long tin cylinder packed with lead or iron balls, each the size and shape of an eyeball. When the cylinder was slid into the cannon’s muzzle, the fit was snug, with just one-tenth of an inch difference between the diameter of the gun tube and the width of the cylinder, a measurement known to artillery specialists as windage. The instant the cannon was fired, the force shoved the balls forward against the tip of the cylinder, which was destroyed as the spheres burst through the tin and sprayed from the cannon like large shotgun pellets. Maximum effective canister range was four hundred yards, but as with a shotgun, canister rounds were most deadly when the target was very close. Sometimes two rounds were fired from the same barrel at the same time. Known, most literally, as double canister, this especially lethal method of killing was often saved for times when the enemy loomed too close for comfort, like those terrifying moments when a position was on the verge of being overrun.